Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 5, 2016

In the jack-of-all-trades football universe of Jabrill Peppers, the strategic options appear unlimited.

Peppers, Michigan’s dynamic redshirt sophomore, is listed as a linebacker and a defensive back on the Wolverines’ roster. But in helping lead Michigan to its first 7-0 start since 2006, Peppers has covered much more ground: 485 snaps in fact, at 12 positions, according to statistics compiled by Michigan’s athletic department.

Peppers’s seemingly ceiling-free ability prompted Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh to compare him recently not to just any other football player but to the multisport Olympian Jim Thorpe. Without openly campaigning for Peppers, Harbaugh has thrust him into prime position for the Heisman Trophy. The Heisman, college football’s top individual honor, was last won by a Michigan man in 1997, when Charles Woodson, another two-way star, was the top vote-getter in the same season the Wolverines finished as co-national champions with Nebraska.

… While in Greece, Howard Carter met Geraldine Vickers, and Englishwoman working in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. The two never married, with Carter moving back to his home city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while Vickers returned to Essex, England.

It was in the Essex town of Southend that Cameron Carter-Vickers was raised, both by his mother and grandmother. He maintained his ties to America through his father, frequently visiting family in the United States, and he told U.S. Soccer, “I’ve lived in England my whole life, but my dad’s American and I’ve always been quite close to my dad, so that’s where the American connection comes in.”

Carter-Vickers benefited from parents who were both former athletes, with his mother previously a talented netball player. As a result, Carter-Vickers excelled in a wide range of sports as a child, winning the Essex Cup on his grade school basketball team, playing rugby, and even qualifying for the national shot put throwing competition at 14-years old.

… It was telling that Klopp referred to Coutinho’s work-rate after Saturday’s game.

“Outstanding,” was how he described it, adding: “You can’t be a genius every day.”

That last statement is key. Creative players want to be on the ball constantly, but not all of them are willing to work selflessly without it. Think Matt Le Tissier from years gone by, or witness the current situation at Everton concerning Ross Barkley.

Coutinho, it is fair to say, has not always been the hardest of runners, but his intensity levels this season have been beyond reproach. It’s taken time, but he’s becoming almost as useful out of possession as in it.

… What is an unappreciated part of the Pulisic story is the influence of English soccer has had on his soccer development.

He was 7 when his mother, Kelley, went to England to teach on a Fulbright grant and the family moved with her to the Oxford area, where he fell in love with the game.

They call it the strongman exercise at Clance Laylor’s gym in downtown Toronto. It’s a grueling workout that consists of pushing a weighted sled almost 200 feet before ditching it for a “farmer’s walk” in which participants walk another 200 feet while lugging heavy weight in each hand.

Just a few weeks removed from a European vacation and a June 29 trade from the Montreal Canadiens to the Nashville Predators that rocked the hockey world, this is how Pernell Karl Subban officially started his summer training in earnest. Six sets on the strongman at the highest weight readily available.

“That was impressive. I think he was in the gym for two weeks and the guys have already been training there for almost two months. And he just came in and bang,” said Laylor, Subban’s trainer for the past seven years.

“That was my indication that this is going to be a summer like I haven’t seen before. That was after the trade,” said Laylor. “His mind is so strong. You can try to break him but he won’t give up.”

A growing gut isn’t the only bad thing that happens when you skip too many runs. “More brain cells are being activated when we exercise than when we’re doing anything else,” says John Ratey, M.D., an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

Athletes are using personal neuro-muscular electrical nerve stimulation to get an edge in the gym and unleash their full potential. We investigated whether it’s safe and if you should try it, too.

… The majority of these studies have used the highest jump for analysis, however a recently published meta-analysis of 151 previous studies has uncovered some interesting results. According to this study, averaging the jumps as we do for our Movement Signature prior to analysis was much more sensitive in detecting fatigue (PubMed). Many of our partners use this simple concept to track changes in vertical jump height alongside changes in the athlete’s Movement Signature over time.

Looking at both of these measures allows both a quantitative measure of the athlete’s output, as well as a qualitative measure of that athlete’s movement sequencing (SpartaPoint). As another previous published article on using the CMJ to monitor fatigue puts it, “NM [Neuromuscular] fatigue may also manifest as an altered movement strategy rather than just a diminished CMJ output” (PubMed). Because the scan itself does not induce fatigue and can be performed so quickly, many of our partners will assess weekly in-season to monitor their athletes.

I have been doing jump analysis for a long time, and each year the problems and challenges tend to actually grow, not diminish. Currently, a mad dash for more jump data is causing many programs in sports training to actually give up testing entirely, because the main needs of coaches are not being taken care of. Specifically, this means making the information part of real day-to-day decision-making or bringing enlightenment to the program.

Contact mats are an excellent way to benchmark change, but are often thought of as replacements to force plates because of calculations after having the same units of power. In this article, two important components will be fully explained in detail. The first is what contact mats can and cannot do with jump testing with athletes. The second is how to implement simple testing in a way that obeys the laws of sport science without making it a burden to coaches.

It’s five days before the start of the 2016-17 season for the Boston Celtics, and head strength and conditioning coach Bryan Doo senses that the players, having endured four weeks of training camp battles and seven exhibition games, need a little something out of the ordinary to wake them up before an afternoon practice.

So as Celtics players meander onto the court expecting high knees or lunges, Doo asks a staffer to fetch 17 hand towels, then instructs each player to tuck one into his waistband. The Celtics’ roster is split in half, with green-clad starters sent to one end line and white-clad reserves steered to the other. Doo barks out some basic instructions, queuing up a game that is one part capture the flag and another part flag football.

Doo stands at center court like a referee and bellows for the game to begin. Second-year guard Terry Rozier playfully backpedals toward center court, his towel exposed as Jae Crowder streaks toward him from the opposite end. Boston’s 15 other players creep cautiously toward center court before someone finally makes a move and then … pure unadulterated bliss.

This review attempts to provide insights into factors associated with fatigue in human and nonhuman animals by using the two fundamental approaches of comparative physiology: determining common principles that govern structure and function in animals that are relatively invariant between animals and evaluating animals that have been highly adapted by natural selection to demonstrate extreme performance. In this review, I approach the topic of fatigue by considering factors that are associated with its reciprocal or inverse or duration of sustained performance before fatigue sets in to end the performance. The two general factors that I consider that affect endurance time more than any other are body temperature and body mass. The former affects endurance time because of thermodynamic effects on chemical reaction rates and metabolism; the latter acts through the mechanism of allometry or scaling. The examples of extreme animal performance that I discuss are two examples of bird migration, the diving performance of marine mammals, and the unique relationship that governs energy cost of locomotion in hopping kangaroos.

April Heinrichs, World Cup winner as a player in 1991 and Olympic gold medal-winning coach in 2004, was named U.S. Soccer’s Women’s Technical Director in January 2011. We spoke to Heinrichs about the USA’s failure to reach the second round of the 2016 U-17 Women’s World Cup, the 2017 launch of the Girls Development Academy that has ignited a turf war with the ECNL and club vs. high school.

SOCCER AMERICA: The USA was eliminated in the first round of the 2016 U-17 Women’s World Cup after failing to qualify for the 2014 U-17 World Cup. Will B.J. Snow continue to be the U.S. U-17 girls national team coach?

APRIL HEINRICHS: We’re certainly in the process of evaluating the program, how we approached the World Cup, all of our age groups underneath it — and we’re all doing self-evaluation. There will be a process in the coming months.

The purpose of this study was to examine the physical demands of a high school American football scrimmage. Male high school football players (N = 25) participated in a spring scrimmage. Global positioning system data and game film were recorded throughout the entirety of the scrimmage to determine the total distance covered, the distance covered in different velocity bands, the number of accelerations and decelerations performed, and the work-to-rest ratio of the scrimmage. The athletes were divided into two groups: linemen (L) (N = 7) vs. non-linemen (NL) (N = 8) for statistical analysis, and independent T-tests with Holm’s sequential Bonferroni adjustment were used to determine differences in movement characteristics between the L and NL groups. Average play duration was 5.7 ± 2.1s, while the rest interval was 33.4 ± 13.6 s between plays, for an overall exercise-to-rest ratio of 1:5.9. Total distance, standing and walking distance, running distance, striding distance, sprinting distance, and total high-speed running distance covered by NL was greater than L (statistically significant at p ≤ 0.05). Distances traveled in each velocity band by position by play are also included to provide context of our findings. Data from the present study add to the pool of support for the use of position-specific training in preparing high school football players for competition.

Designers of health, wellness, and high-end fitness applications can quickly and easily validate next-generation solutions with the ultra-small hSensor Platform from Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. … Creating a custom board with sensors can be complex, as designers must first build custom hardware and firmware to validate their concepts and then build prototypes before starting any field trials. From there, they generally spend a significant amount of time evaluating sensors and existing solutions. Maxim’s hSensor Platform eliminates the extra 3-6 months it typically takes to develop a prototype by bringing all the hardware building blocks together on one PCB, as well as having readily-accessible hardware functionality with the ARM mbed hardware development kit (HDK).

Oregon State’s Greg Herman has developed a transparent sensor to monitor glucose (via tears) in a contact lens. The device could also be used to control insulin infusions, by transmitting real-time data to a pump.

Similar technology has been developed by Google, although their lens is not (currently) fully transparent, and Noviosense, which requires a user to insert a device in the lower lid.

DARPA is working on a new way to power war-zone sensors that watch over roads U.S. armed forces travel. The U.S. Defense Advance Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Troy Olsson described its Near Zero Power Radio Frequency and Sensor Operations (N-Zero) in a keynote (Monday Oct. 31) at the IEEE Sensor 2016 conference in Orlando, Florida (Oct.30-Nov.2).

By 2018 the DARPA’s N-Zero initiative aims to have deployable sensor networks that require near-zero standby-power, a goal the team quickly found that was impossible without microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In addition the teams discovered an extra benefit of MEMS — an advantage the team had never imaged possible. MEMS provides not just near-zero standby power, but can be configured for absolute zero standby power by using the power from the signal to be detected itself to power-up the transmitter. And in some situations, the transmitter too can be powered without a battery, by storing up energy on a super-capacitor from renewable sources — from solar to vibration harvesters.

Most of us can recognize an object after seeing it once or twice. But the algorithms that power computer vision and voice recognition need thousands of examples to become familiar with each new image or word.

Researchers at Google DeepMind now have a way around this. They made a few clever tweaks to a deep-learning algorithm that allows it to recognize objects in images and other things from a single example—something known as “one-shot learning.” The team demonstrated the trick on a large database of tagged images, as well as on handwriting and language.

A New York judge is forcing the N.F.L. to reveal something it has desperately tried to keep secret: how the league’s medical officials handled the issue of brain injuries over the last two decades.

On Monday, Justice Jeffrey K. Oing of New York State Supreme Court issued an order that will let insurance companies that wrote policies for the N.F.L. determine if the league knew about the dangers of concussions and deliberately concealed them from players. The issue is central to whether the insurers will pay for a class-action settlement brought by more than 5,000 retired players who accused the league of fraud and negligence because they were not told about the risks of repeated head hits.

The N.F.L. is likely to appeal Justice Oing’s ruling.

… “We are going to be leaving population medicine — where it’s one size fits all — in favor of individualized medicine,” the Scripps cardiologist predicted. This individualization infers that patients should drive their own care, Topol said.

To get there, patients will need to control their own health data. Topol noted that New Hampshire is the only state that grants citizens legal ownership of their health information; everywhere else in the U.S., medical offices and health systems control patient records.

“That’s completely wrong. That has to get fixed,” Topol said. “It should be your data.”

Transparency is long overdue. Why not let the doctors speak or provide rationale for return to play decisions?

Once again we have another concussion controversy involving a quarterback. Last season we had Case Keenum. In the NFL opener, Cam Newton became the national focus. Now we have the Alex Smith situation.

The Chiefs QB’s head hit the turf, lacerating his ear, and had to be helped up by Spencer Ware (who ironically later suffered his own concussion) and a referee. Smith passed a concussion test and was returned to the game. The QB later suffered a second blow to the head on the turf and was then deemed to have a concussion.

I am not suggesting that the Chiefs or any doctor did anything wrong here. I am saying the optics of the situation are not good when a wobbly QB is allowed to stay in the game.

We revisit three high school programs from three years ago to see whether the growing awareness regarding head trauma is boosting confidence in the game—or driving kids away

Is there a better way to identify cardiovascular conditions that may kill young athletes? The answer is “yes.” An electrocardiogram can reliably identify about 60 to 70 percent of conditions that cause sudden cardiac death. The test is simple and noninvasive.

A Wada report on the anti-doping methods employed at Rio 2016 has highlighted “serious failings”.

The World Anti-Doping Agency said many athletes who had been targeted for testing “simply could not be found”.

It added that, on some days, “up to 50% of tests were aborted”.

Caffeine’s role in improving athletic performance has been studied and promoted for close to 100 years. After conducting hundreds of studies, researchers concluded that caffeine has a positive effect on runners‘ and cyclists‘ performance in a laboratory setting.

Do these results apply to routine training or race-day performance? The answer is: maybe.

… A few have “near-medicinal-like qualities,” says Shawn Talbott, a biochemist, fellow at the American College of Sports Medicine, and author of The Secret Of Vigor. To him, a food is super if eating a normal quantity can deliver a research-backed benefit.

The trick is knowing how to separate the good stuff from the chaff. With that in mind, we asked a few dietitians and researchers to help us rank some of this decade’s buzziest ingredients. Consider this your license to stop choking down kimchi and gluten-free bread and start hitting the blueberries and red wine hard.

… Questions regarding a pitcher’s ability to compete at an optimal level on short rest usually revolve around whether or not his arm will be at full strength. More often than not, this comes down to if he says he’s “good to go,” and what the manager feels in his gut. … What if arm strength isn’t the only thing that needs to be restored? Pitching in a major league game requires extraordinary physical and mental effort. Achieving a sufficient level of Recovery between appearances goes well beyond simply being capable of throwing the baseball.

… Because of the increase in quality within the sides and the quality of the coaching and tactical acumen in the league, the league is very tight and close at the top. The top five are separated by five points, the top three have the same points. It’s set to be a fascinating season. But someone will have to underachieve in their ambitions. One of the top six, even eight if you include the ambitions of clubs like Everton and Southampton, and even West Ham, all want to break into that top four. So there will be some big name coaches and sides who fail this year. So what could be the difference between success and failure? Based on what we’ve seen up to now, it appears that fluidity is the key to success.

Despite widespread perceptions of elite US sport as meritocratic, there is little empirical research on the social origins of those who play college and professional sports in the US or how these vary by race. We use the case of American football, linking Entertainment and Sports Programming Network’s national recruit rankings data on incoming college football players from 2007–2016 (N=929) with 2000 US Census data. Our study compares hometown socioeconomic and demographic indicators for black and white college athletes and then for those drafted into the National Football League. Findings show that the socioeconomic and demographic profiles of the hometowns producing elite football athletes vary by both athlete race and draft status. Black draftees come from denser, more socioeconomically disadvantaged and blacker hometowns than black non-drafted athletes, while white draftees come from less socioeconomically disadvantaged hometowns than white non-drafted athletes.

Theo Epstein overcame 108 years of history to build a championship team in Chicago. In the process, he ended baseball’s long-running analytics war by proving that an objective, data-driven approach can change the game.

… Maddon saw them and kept walking back to his office. He rarely has meetings with his players—only about three of them in the past 10 years, he estimates. So the manager didn’t bother to inquire about what was going on in the weight room.

“It’s crazy how things happen for a reason,” he says. “I love when players have meetings; I hate when I do. So they had their meeting, and the big part of it was, We don’t quit. We don’t quit.”

Cubs president Theo Epstein met with the manager in his office to confer about their pitching. Maddon had already improvised by inserting Jon Lester into the fifth inning in relief of Kyle Hendricks with Cleveland’s Carlos Santana at first base and two outs. In a pregame strategy session the last thing Epstein and Maddon agreed upon was that Lester, because of his mental block throwing to bases and his limited history of relief work, would enter a game only at the start of an inning.

… clubs have recently demonstrated that money isn’t the only differentiator. Last season Leicester City shocked the world by executing a playing style – among other things – that rivals found hard to stifle. Clubs like Dinamo Zagreb continue to demonstrate their ability to balance youth development with repeated Champions League qualification. In Spain, Atlético’s succession planning process has enabled them to replace Torres, with Aguero, with Falcao, with Costa and now Griezemann, while remaining fiercely competitive in an unbalanced league. And Atalanta have accumulated more than €30m of income from player trading over the past 3 seasons, yet sit 6th in Serie A (and deservedly so, according to their current underlying performance).

Paradoxically, having tasted success, these market leading companies and clubs are now relatively cash rich and so face a whole new challenge – how to avoid complacency and maintain success. But that’s for another blog.